There are no telephone lines on this sparsely settled island in the middle of Penobscot Bay, and yet there is a phone at the Eagle Island Inn, a rambling 19th Century white-frame house that has a commanding view of the bay.
To arrange Thanksgiving dinner with their relatives on the mainland, innkeepers Bob and Helene Quinn have to make sure the antenna of the phone’s handset is pointing at Deer Isle, the nearest spot with phone connections. The handset is part of an extremely powerful cordless telephone. The unit’s base sits in a friend’s garage on Deer Isle, 3 miles away from the handset.
“It works pretty well,” said Helene Quinn, who constitutes 25 percent of the full-time population of Eagle Island. “A handmade antenna in the garage directs the signal to this island.”
For the independent-minded souls who live on the islands along the Maine coast, this jury-rigged phone link encapsulates the joys and frustrations of carrying on an almost 19th Century way of life at the dawn of the 21st.
As in many small communities across America, a powerful attachment to a place and a tradition keeps Maine’s islanders from moving to the mainland. To preserve their way of life, they sometimes have to improvise when it comes to things most Americans regard as birthrights, such as reliable phones, convenient schools and postal service.
“There are a lot of admirable things about island communities,” said David Platt of the Island Institute, a local non-profit group that works to keep the state’s island settlements intact. “People who are comfortable living in an isolated environment tend to be pretty self-reliant and able to cope with just about anything that comes along. They seem to have more control over their lives than we feel we have sitting around in the suburbs.”
Depending on the tides, which can rise and fall 25 feet or more, as many as 4,000 islands lie off the coast of Maine, some of them bearing the same name; there’s another Eagle Island farther south. In the summer, many of these islands are crowded with vacationers from “away,” as native Mainers refer to anyone who was not born and raised in the state.
Now, most of the islands that were thronged in the warm months are empty, their vacation cottages shuttered against the fierce winter winds that whip off the water. The Quinns have closed off the unheated portion of their house and retreated to the winter wing.
Only 14 islands are inhabited year-round, ranging in population from more than 1,000 on Vinalhaven, a large island a few miles offshore from Rockland, to places like Eagle Island, home to the Quinns, their daughter and their son-in-law.
In many respects, life here seems little changed from the early 19th Century, when the first Quinns settled on the island. A wooden tank by the side of the inn collects rain for bathing. At night, a hand-carried lantern lights the way to the outhouse. Garbage is taken care of by a few chickens and a goat out back.
“We don’t feel isolated,” said Helene Quinn, 55, who cooks on a firewood stove and pumps drinking water from a well. “We’re separate but not isolated.”
Services such as electricity, schools and regular ferries to the mainland vary widely depending on the population of an island. But on even the largest, the residents cultivate separation, relishing their insulation from the madding pace of mainland life. Out here, existence is governed by such things as weather and tides instead of alarm clocks and traffic reports.
“There’s a certain amount of anarchy, a certain escaping Wal-Mart and McDonald’s, that I like,” said Eva Murray, 35, who lives 20 miles from the mainland on Mantinicus Island, where she is town clerk, emergency medical technician and substitute schoolteacher. “For all the logistical headaches that I have to put up with, they’re balanced out by all the pop culture garbage I don’t have to put up with.”
These islanders represent a living link to Maine’s earliest colonial history. The first settlements in what is now Maine were established on three islands in the early 17th Century, not long after the Pilgrims in the nearby colony of Massachusetts celebrated America’s first Thanksgiving in 1621.
“The reason people came here was to fish, and the islands were a convenient base,” said Platt. “This is where the fish were, and the fishermen were safer from Indian attack.”
In the days before the railroad, ships were the most reliable means of transport, and the Maine islands were “right on the highway of the time,” he said.
Vessels made regular runs from Boston and New York. Because of the advantage of being on the water, the islands even supported a thriving granite-quarrying industry, providing stone for countless New England courthouses and bank buildings.
By the mid-19th Century, some 300 islands in the Gulf of Maine supported thriving fishing, farming and trading communities.
With the expansion of the railroad and the mass movement toward America’s midsection, Maine emptied. Small island farms could not compete with the large, flat fields of the Midwest. Only fishing and tourism kept the islands going. Most islanders make their livings by lobstering.
Eagle Island’s one-room school closed in 1942; other islands typically have one-room schools for kindergarten through 8th grade. For high school, students commute by ferry to the mainland or their families move off the islands. The Quinns, who split their time between the island and the mainland while their children were in school, have lived on the island year-round since 1991, after their youngest finished high school.
“I have a fierce homing instinct,” said Bob Quinn, 61, who is the fifth generation of his family to live on Eagle Island. “I always felt the best about life in general when I was here.”
Mail delivery can be catch-as-catch-can. Quinn, whose main livelihood is lobstering, makes a twice-weekly mail run in his boat to the nearest post office on Deer Isle. Eagle Island hasn’t had a post office in decades.
The specter of a padlocked post office haunts many islanders. Lose the post office, said Murray, the Matinicus clerk, and “we’d be a little outpost. It’d be every man for himself.”
Busy post offices have little to fear, so in the early 1990s, the postmistress on Islesford, a couple miles offshore from the popular tourist area around Bar Harbor, hit upon a way to boost sales of stamps at hers.
Islesford has a population of about 75 that balloons into the hundreds during the summer. When tourists step up to the window of the post office at the back of the island’s general store, they find a stack of order forms to buy stamps by mail.
“I give summer residents the forms and ask them to order their stamps from here when they get back home,” said Joy Sprague, 43, whose family has been on the island for four generations.
Sprague, who includes a monthly newsletter about island happenings when she sends out stamps, gets orders from as far away as Istanbul and Saudi Arabia. Stamp sales have grown from $14,000 in 1994 to $66,000 this year.
Her motivation was not to stave off being closed; the Postal Service has never threatened to shutter the Islesford office, Sprague said. But now, other island post offices have adopted her approach as a way of ensuring their survival.
“It keeps me busy, and it gives things a personal touch,” said Sprague, who values the tight-knit quality of island life that she witnesses from her postal perch. “There is something here that goes much deeper than blood. In the city, you would have friends all in the same age group, but here, there are friendships of people from all different ages and walks of life. We have this continuity of life.”
